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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

It is the Friday News Roundup, and we've got lots of news this week.

We're going to start off talking about Ryan Roth and his attempted assassination against Donald Trump, the campaign rhetoric as it heats up, and then Israel.

So stay with us, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marciabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

Victor has a website, victorhanson.com, and you can go to it

and join us for $5 a month or $50 a year.

And it's called The Blade of Perseus.

So Victor, there's a lot of news out about Ryan Roth, and I wanted to get your take on some things.

I was noticing that he

has, these are things that are being said about him, that he has ties with Ukrainian mafia.

John Solomon on just the news has found evidence that he was recruiting Afghanis and other

foreign nationals to go fight in the Ukraine.

And then, most of all, there was this nurse, Chelsea Walsh, who was interviewed by Jesse Waters.

And she said that because his

personality was so volatile and he was a con man, and that he was always talking about assassinating important individuals, that she, in fact, warned the feds about them.

At least she put in a report about him.

I was wondering your thoughts.

Well, you know,

we have all these reports about him, but he seems to be

a completely invented character.

I mean,

he, in the pictures of his house, he was a hoarder.

He made $35,000 a year tops.

He had no net worth.

And he traveled to six or seven nations.

And he talked, and he was on the internet.

He was going to

get Afghan veterans to fight for Taiwan, fight for Ukraine.

He had all these crackpock ideas, but how much actual

recruitment and fighting did any of these things do?

He seemed like he was just a complete blowhard.

The interesting thing is that

we know that there was an Iranian operative who has been arrested, a Pakistani national, who was trying to round up people to kill Trump.

We know that this person, we know that the Iranians, as is

disclosed in the last 24 hours, they hacked Donald Trump's campaign site and then they tried to give that information, or they in fact did,

to the Biden, excuse me, the Harris campaign.

And we know this guy tried to act

as if he had Iranian contacts.

And so all this is very strange.

Because if a person has no sustenance, how do you even stay one night in Palm Beach?

How do you travel all over the Middle East, not the Middle East, but Eastern Europe and to Turkey, which is in the Middle East?

How do you do any of that?

He doesn't have any source of income.

And he seems to be crazy, but how did a guy with such limited talent make all these contacts that all these people are popping up out of nowhere?

And I think part of the answer is that the New York Times and all these people were so pro-Ukrainian, Ukraine-Ukraine that

they thought they were going to get this inspirational story from almost anybody who claimed that he was recruiting freedom fighters.

It was very reminiscent.

of the Spanish Civil Wars of 1936 to 39 when the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

And there were a lot of grifters then, but there were these international brigades that all flocked to Spain.

Very idealistic, but when you actually look at the actual military efficacy,

it was very ambiguous.

And I think this guy was one of the people who just was a self-invention, which begs the question:

how did he get to a

golf course undetected at a place where everybody from Don Jr.

to the sheriff said was the most vulnerable place in the whole course?

And then

there were people on TV like Mon DeSantis.

He said as soon as he heard about there was an assassination attempt at the Trump golf course, he knew exactly where it was because he had played it before.

And he said, you know, there's this dog leg in between these particular holes and there's shrubbery and it's easy to not see, you can't see anybody right there.

And they have an open shot on two different greens.

So given all this,

how did he know Trump was there?

How was he there for 12 hours and no one knew?

Where did he get the money to go to Palm Beach?

Did he talk to anybody about it?

Where did he get this

modified

Kalishnikov rifle with the serial numbers rubbed off?

Where did he get the ceramic plates that are very expensive?

Where did he get the fake license plates for his car?

Who did he talk to?

Because somebody like that who was so boisterous and loquacious would have talked to somebody because he's an egomaniac narcissist.

And yet

there's no information.

It's like Mr.

Crooks, the deceased that tried to kill Trump.

And the common denominator is, I think, when people are trying to explain the inexplicable there, how come they didn't have drones, how come they refused help, how come the people in the building below didn't see?

Is that they were lackadaisical.

The same thing here.

They probably thought, well, Trump just decided to play golf.

You know how Trump is.

He's just crazy or he's just Trump.

We're not going to, they don't take it seriously.

And

the left got flat-footed, Sammy,

on the first one.

Because

the blood was there and there was this great degree of empathy.

And the few few people who came out and

cheered that on were kind of instantly repudiated.

And he got a big bounce in the polls given the Biden decline.

They thought, you know what?

Not this time.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

New York Times headlines were of the effect that

strange man on golf course.

If you read all of the headlines of the left mainstream media, it wasn't really, almost none said assassination attempt foiled.

And then there were all these people on the lunatic left, like Joey Reed and others, that just said that he deserved it.

And most of the Democratic Party said that he

deserved it.

After the event happened,

Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader of the Democratic Party, said

he lied and he said Donald Trump will institute the 2025 project agenda.

Donald Trump wants to ban abortion with a federal fiat.

We must stop them.

And then of course we had

it came out that David Plouffe?

Plouffe Pluff, he's now working, he was the Obama architect, campaign architect.

He's now working for Kamala.

Something surfaced where he earlier had said that Donald Trump had to be destroyed.

And of course, we had Dan

Goldman last year who said that Donald Trump should be, what, exterminated?

Yeah.

Or eliminated.

Eliminated.

Eliminated.

Eliminated.

Yes, eliminated.

Excuse me.

And then we had that crazy

Rick Wilson

and he said you had to put a bullet to stop Donald Trump.

He said that in the past.

Joe Biden just last year in a call to donors said that you have to put him in the bullseye.

And I had written about that, as I mentioned to Jack, on two occasions.

They had lowered the bar to such a degree that an unhinged person would think if I shot Donald Trump, I would be in the same pantheon as those who tried to, I don't know, Operation Valkyrie, that tried to kill Hitler, that are now iconic.

So.

Hillary said that

they, the Democrats, should keep saying Trump is a threat to democracy.

That's the question.

And she also said that he tried to collude with the Russians.

That

has been completely debunked.

Why would she say that when we know that she hired, she used three paywalls to disguise the payments that she paid, DNC, Perkins-Coey, Houston GPS, to hire a foreign national, which is illegal to use in a campaign, as a campaign operative.

And yet she's so emboldened that she can say that.

She was the one that did that.

She's really become a caricature of herself.

You know, I felt sorry for her when I saw her on TV.

She was unrecognizable.

She's aged terribly.

She's got a jabba-the-hut look appearance about her.

You know what I mean?

She's just stationary and obese almost.

And then she's got...

She has...

She's just obsessed with Donald Trump.

And

so

again, we have two things going on.

You have Trump, Trump, Trump, Hitler, Hitler, Hitler.

And you have a general impression that the Secret Service

either can't or won't protect him.

And when the acting Secret Service Director, is his name Root?

Root?

Yeah,

not Root.

What is the...

But anyways, Roe, I think it's the Root.

Roe, excuse me.

Yes.

Well, when he said that everything worked right, did you hear him say that?

That we've,

it didn't work right.

Anytime a person gets that close and has a sniper's little nest there, and he goes undetected for 12 hours.

And he comes within seconds of shooting at the president with a clear shot, and he only was stopped by two things: an observant secret

service agent that shot, I guess missed him, but drove him off, and then a young woman who saw his

car and was able to take a picture of the license plates.

Other than that,

what went right?

I don't know what went right.

And yet, how is that guy even still there?

You get the impression, I mean, this goes way back to even Obama.

You remember when you had the Secret Service agents that were

drinking and cavorting with prostitutes when he was going, I think it was to Colombia or Chile, Obama was.

Yeah.

He was in Colombia.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And they had to.

They had a party or something.

And they made an edict that you can't drink for 12 hours before.

So the Secret Service, I don't know what it is, but whatever it is, it's the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ,

whatever it is.

And people can fill in the blanks.

It's either DI or it's weaponization, and they're all left-wing.

It lacks discipline, I think.

There's no consequences.

Civil service, I don't know what it is, but this country is on the

road to third world perdition.

It really is.

It's really accelerating.

It's really scary.

So

we've got 45 days, 43 days, I think, now.

And every nut in the United States is thinking,

if that crazy

Ruth guy can get there for 12 hours and that nutty

Crooks guy can get a shot off, I can do better than that.

And obviously, they're not serious about protecting Trump.

And if half the left, and there was a poll today, did you see it with the Democratic Party?

I think it was conducted in part by Rasmussen.

Would you be happy to see Trump shot?

Really?

Oh, my God.

Because about a quarter of Democrats' polls said yes, and then

25% said they were not sure.

So when you have that level of animosity and hatred that's been inculcated by Kamala Harris, and by the way, she gave an

interview with some people who belonged to the Association of Black Journalists.

And she just went after the same old lies,

the wilding of Central Park, Trump is a racist, he destroyed the economy, all the Charlottesville, the whole thing.

So when they keep doing that, that's what Peter Ducey asked Corinne Jean-Pierre.

She got so angry,

she flipped out

because she knew it was true and it made her look bad.

He had the audacity to say, you know, if you keep saying that he's an existential threat or a danger, you're only going to encourage more of that.

Yeah.

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So Victor, I was noticing that you did say Kamala at the National Association of Black Journalists.

I noticed one thing about what she said.

I know there's been a lot of discussion of her word salads and emptiness, but he said, she said at one point they were asking her and she was referring to her time as a California

prosecutor.

Word for word is what she said in the debate, word for word what she said with the Philadelphia reporter.

But wait, she said, my words could move markets, is what she said.

And what struck me was that she was basically saying,

I've been warned and I know how to speak bureaucraties, and that's her expertise.

And it's really just basically saying I can talk a lot of emptiness and try to sound important.

And that seems like what she does.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, she's had three interviews, none with a serious national televised national network interviewer on her own.

She's had one with Waltz, with Dana Bash was a joke because they provided the multiple choice answers in a number of questions.

And she had this one with the televised Philadelphia local anchor man and he kind of threw a t-ball,

put her up on a t-ball and said, swing, and she couldn't do it.

It was just a joke.

She talked about lawns and houses and middle class.

And then they had this one.

Some of the three journalists were trying to ask legitimate questions.

She wouldn't answer them.

Are you better off?

And then she just out and out and out lied.

She said, When we came in here, she said three things.

When we came in here, there was the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.

You know what the unemployment rate was in January of 2021?

6.4.

6.4, after the whole economy had been shut down for two years, that the recovery was going gangbusters.

And then she said,

and oh, by the way, the inflation rate was 1.2.

1.2.

She got it up to nine within a year.

1.2.

The strategic petroleum reserve was full.

It's now only half full.

They've drained half of it.

The price of gas was $2.40.

Even when they were bragging, they brought the cast downs, $3.60 nationwide average.

Mortgages, they were between 2.5 and 3.4.

They were between 6.5 and 7 now.

Every indicator was wrong.

And she said, yeah, this is the worst since the Great Depression.

Then she said, we had the greatest

attempt at domestic terrorism or violence since the Civil War.

Well, the Oklahoma bombing killed, what, 240 people and injured 600 in 1995.

And 9-11 killed 3,000 people.

There was only five people who died.

There were no policemen that were killed.

Officer Sicknick died of natural causes.

The only person who was killed was Ashley Babbitt.

Contrast that with May, June, July, August, September of 2020.

14,000 people arrested, $2 billion in damage, 35 to 40 people killed directly as of 14,000.

And she cheered it on.

This will not stop.

It shouldn't stop.

This is a movement.

It was just totally shameless what she said.

And then she said, we had the greatest epidemic in history.

Well, yeah, it came right during Trump, and he wasn't responsible.

If he hadn't had the travel ban, it would have been even worse because it gave us about a month or two to get going.

So it was pathetic.

And she won't talk about this dismal

Biden record.

She doesn't know how to disown him.

She doesn't know.

It's very hard to to disown him when she's the current vice president.

You can tell that he's not fond of

putting on a mega hat.

I mean, when you lose your cognitive

firewalls, then you'll do anything of your natural inclination.

And that's what he did.

I thought that was cute.

So I think that these are incremental.

What I'm trying to say, struggle to say, is

she can get 20 million people once a week from now on for the next eight weeks, 10 weeks,

six weeks, 48 days,

40 days.

All she has to do is call up ABC, CBS, and NBC and sit down one-on-one with somebody who will love her softballs.

But she won't do it.

She won't do it because she's had these three interviews and everyone was a word salad.

Now they're suppressing the news.

They don't report that, but it leaks out and it's starting to confirm the picture that she cannot talk.

She repeats herself.

And then she plays this.

I mean, the woman is, what, 59 years old?

She plays this little swarmy teenage flirt, you know.

Yeah, I'm okay.

I just want to take it.

It's just kind of, she's used to flirting with men, I guess.

But it doesn't do any.

I mean, when she doesn't have an idea and she can't express it, if she did, she starts to bat her eyes and go back and forth with her hands and get that nasal voice, and it doesn't work.

People get sick of it.

Whatever one thinks of Trump, he's out there beating his head against the wall.

I mean the guy is, he will talk to anyone, anywhere, anytime about anything.

And he keeps having the same message.

We're going to build.

We're going to get back.

We're going to do, we're going to rebuild this tonight.

We're going to rebuild the subways.

We're going to stop, we'll get the parks.

She doesn't say any of that.

It's all about either grievance.

You know, we're going to have an equity economy, and we have to realize that a lot of people can't.

It's all about subsidizing and taking existing wealth and carving it and redistributing it.

It's not about rebuilding, making America great in the sense that we're going to have a defense, and this is what the defense budget is going to be like.

We're going to have planes.

We're going to have

800 ships.

Any of that.

There's no inspirational that we can do it.

It's just the same angry,

kind of lukewarm DEI crap.

And I don't see how anybody can vote for it, really though.

Yeah, it's embarrassing.

It really is.

To see this interview today, when she, those three young black journalists were pretty good.

I look at their faces.

It's like, come on, Camela, don't embarrass us.

And she did.

I noticed that when she's talking in these interviews, that she often also, the third theme she has is that, I feel your pain.

I feel your, I know how it feels

to be this way.

It's a Bill Clinton therapeutic.

Yeah.

Therapeutics.

I feel your pain.

So it's what the Democrats all do.

She's been told, come across as empathetic.

Number one.

Number two,

do not go over your scattershot agenda.

Do not, under any circumstances, bring up wage and price controls again.

Do not bring up your wealth tax.

Do not bring up your tax on realized income.

Do not talk about a higher federal income tax rate.

Do not talk about reducing the

probate inheritance tax from an exemption of 11 or 12 million per person down to two.

That's a house on the coast of California.

That's a bungalow.

And so she doesn't mention it.

Do not mention that you're for reparations.

Do not mention you're for universal health care and get rid of private health care.

Do not mention you want to give subsidized

transitional surgeries for trans people in prison and who are illegal.

Don't mention mention any of that.

Because if you do, you're going to look like an idiot and you're going to lose your big donor class.

So that's why

she doesn't have a comprehensive systematic agenda.

Because she knows that all she has to do is wait till Trump says something, no tax on Social Security, no tax on

Social Security, no tax on tips.

Secure the border.

That's what she's doing.

It's just emulating Trump.

Yeah.

Well, it seems like she just doesn't have an agenda and she doesn't have a good team that polls for some of the things she wants to say.

And so she just throws them against the wall and half of them are failing.

No, I think she's got a really good team.

You think so?

Yes, I do.

I think

they were the very people who were saying Joe Biden will never be removed because to remove her puts Piro Agno redukes.

Yeah.

And she's incompetent.

Nobody's that stupid.

And then when they did get him out, and they, oh my God,

and they sat down with her and they listened to her for a couple of days and they said, it's worse than we thought.

So no way is this person going to go out and campaign in an impromptu fashion.

No news conferences, no

town hall, and only one debate, but it's going to be done by ABC, which is known as the most biased network there is.

And no agenda,

no explanation of why she's changed, no explanation of why didn't she enact these things right now as vice president, because the president is missing in action.

None of that.

And they've done a pretty good job.

They've had 90 days.

They're halfway done.

And we don't know what she wants.

She doesn't speak to anybody.

And she just smouths the same platitudes that she grew up.

A woman who's...

As we said, 0.001 of households have two parents or PhDs from UC Berkeley, Lee University.

She lived in a posh neighborhood neighborhood of Montreal, and she's transmogrified into a struggling middle class, lower middle class kid in Oakland.

That's their narrative.

And then that sappy, little swarmy giggle and all that stuff.

And why I say they know what they're doing, it's even right now.

At least according to the poll, she's slightly ahead.

45 days left, 45 days are gone.

Well, since you're speaking about that.

It's a run-out-the-clock campaign.

Yeah, let's take a break and come back from these these messages.

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Welcome back to the Victor Davis-Hansen Show.

You can find Victor on X at his handle at V D Hansen and on Facebook at Vict Hansen's Morning Cup.

So, Victor, according to Peter Till, all she needs to do is keep herself close because he says if the election is close, the Dems will cheat to get Harris in office.

Did you see that?

I did, and I saw his explanation of it.

He didn't mean just that they were going to cheat on the ballots.

He meant baked into

that

symptomology was that they have already changed the voting laws in the nine or ten swing states so that Election Day is a construct.

It's not 70% of the electorate, it's only 30.

And it's therefore

because the Democrats have mastered it, far more likely to be rigged, is what he was trying to say.

But that's an age-old debate.

That is, two questions.

When the polls show Donald Trump even

with Kamala Harris, and given what happened in 2016 and 2020,

and look at the midterms, is Donald Trump

not because necessarily the polls are rigged, but they are a little bit, because they want to give Biden momentum, but are they accurate because the average average person who is voting for Trump will be far more reluctant to tell you that, or somebody with Harris will be happy because they'll think it's socially and culturally acceptable.

And

if that were to be true, how many points does he need,

not what the polls say, but what he's really ahead by?

So let's say today Donald Trump in the national poll is a point and a half behind.

And according to conventional wisdom, that puts him 0.5 or one point ahead.

But how far does he have to be ahead to overcome what Peter Till was talking about?

All the big cities, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Vegas, Phoenix, Washington, New York, all of these places, some of them are in Keystone, Charlotte,

North Carolina, you know.

And you're talking about Atlanta, talking about Vegas, you're talking about Phoenix, Tucson.

They're all controlled by Democrats.

And to what degree then does Trump have to be one point, half a point, three point?

Who knows?

So that to overcome the

either way you put it, if you're not so cynical, you say, well, they're not cheating on ballot.

They couldn't do that.

They're not stuffing ballots.

It's just that they've mastered mail and vote, and that gives them a two-point advantage.

Or,

by that I mean, they're mailing out ballots automatically in these states at the DMV the

Workman's Compensation Insurance Office the Disability Office the building contract building permit office and you just get it sent to your house and under different names different addresses who knows but we know that millions of ballots are mailed out or can't be accounted for okay

and the Republicans obviously don't know how to do that as well so what's the how how much ahead does Trump have to be

to overcome that?

My instincts, without any

scientific support, is

he has to be one or two points ahead in every one of the swing states.

And that would translate into an actual lead of about four points, and he would lose about three points because of the way the ballots will be cast.

And I think that's borne out by some of the

midterm results and some of the 2020 polls.

Yeah.

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So, well, Victor, there's been all sorts of

discussion of rhetoric out there.

The left is saying that the assassination was due to Trump's rhetoric, oddly enough.

But J.D.

Vance also had a really strong tweet,

or X, at tweet at X,

calling for public debate rather than censorship and violent rhetoric from the past, I mean, from the left.

And they are, and he gave some very concise examples of how one might say what they want to say and how they actually say it.

And I'll just give you one.

He says, it's one thing

to say

rhetoric is overheated and and maybe talk about it, but and it's another thing, as the left does, to say Trump's rhetoric invited assassination.

So that was just one of his very great examples of how the left is getting very, very violent and as usual they're blaming

heaven forbid if somebody had made an assassination attempt

on any of the Democratic candidates of the last few years.

And by the way, at the presidential level, at least, people who are running for office, think about it a second.

Who killed John Kennedy purportedly, Lee Harvey Oswald?

He was a communist, right?

He was working with, he knew, we never knew the whole story about him, but he was deeply involved in Cuban communist activities.

And who shot Robert Kennedy?

a left-wing Palestinian radical, Siran Sirhan.

And who sh you were talking about presidential candidates, and who tried to kill

Gerald Ford, two whacked-out people on the left, and who tried to kill Reagan, a whacked-out, nutty-eaten, crazy person, and who talking about who tried to wipe out the Republican leadership, Steve Scalise and that.

And so, this idea that it's both sides, it's not true.

There's a propensity for people on the left to be more likely to try, at least in the modern age.

And I don't know whether that's a result of rhetoric, but I can tell you that

if you look at Snoop Deb, we went over them, if you look at what Snoop Dogg said he wanted to shoot him and Madonna blow him up

and

Shakespeare in the park stab him and all of those.

I think I named 15 of those.

Johnny Depp.

Johnny Depp, where's John Wilkes Booth?

You add them all up.

And then somebody just tell me who is a notable,

well-known conservative who says that that about Obama or Harris.

Nobody.

So this idea of both sides, we've got to cool down already, it's coming more from the left.

I think everybody who listens know this phenomenon.

And I know that when I'm with people on the left that are close friends or have been in the past, are family members,

two things I've noticed.

The idea that they want to insist that everybody should get along and there should be no politics comes from them.

Most people that are conservative just keep it, they don't want to even get near that topic, and then they immediately break their own rules.

They bring it up and they want a confrontation.

And so it's not both sides.

No.

It really isn't.

And

I think everybody should keep that in mind.

It's not both sides.

It's something deeply intrinsic and leftist ideology.

They really do think as utopians and purveyors of equity

that they have the moral high ground and they're stuck with a bunch of us who are stupid and can't get on the cosmopolitan globalist utopian page.

And therefore, they have every right

to ban gas stoves, to ban assault weapons, even though 91% of all murders take place through the use of a gun.

They have every right because they're morally superior.

So any means justified or...

or okay.

However immoral they are.

Yeah, because the ends are always noble.

And that's how, if you just keep that in mind, it explains why your long-lost sister or friend calls up one day, I can't believe you voted for Trump.

You make me sick.

That kind of stuff.

Yeah.

And conservative people just don't want to get there.

No.

There's another thing, too, is they have a deep envy of people in private enterprise that are successful and happy.

I go back to the old, a member of my family once said that he's an idiot.

He couldn't run a 7-Eleven.

and i thought i couldn't either that's one of the hardest things in the world you know security inventory profit margin anybody that can do that's a genius much harder than being a professor of classics

so anyway i think there's so many

there's so many areas among the left mind that uh just

They're pretty obvious why they are so envious and angry and want to

demonize Donald Trump.

And if something, heaven forbid, if they shoot him and they try it again,

they'll even double down more.

So just as the first assassination attempt had some craziness and the second had a lot of crazy commentary, the next one will be really crazy.

And heaven forbid, if they would ever succeed, they would have no feeling of remorse at all.

No.

None.

None.

And you know what that would do to the country?

Just think of it.

That has never happened

in the general election.

I mean they tried with Teddy Roosevelt but he was the third party candidate at the time and he survived and he went on to campaign.

Robert Kennedy was not yet nominated but it hasn't happened and to take out not just a candidate he's not like

another Republican like a McCain or Romney he's a

the iconic representation of an entire movement that is trying to rebrand the Republican Party.

And the ballots have already been printed in the states.

It would just throw the whole country into a constitutional crisis.

It really would.

It would just be a disaster.

And the idea that 25% of Democrats could poll that they thought that would be a good thing, it's just nuts.

It is.

And I'm really, like I said, in last August, I said it was going to happen again.

I wrote that twice.

I didn't mean to

brag that I was Nostradalmas.

I was just trying to write that so people would wake up and stop calling him Hitler and an existential threat.

When you have this

latest assassin, when he has this, would-be assassin, when he has this democracy is going to be on the ballot, you think he thought that up himself?

He got that from the Democratic Talking Points.

And they know it.

Yeah.

And then it just, I don't know.

MSND, I turned into Joy Reed the other day, just to see the type of dribble.

It's just pure hatred.

She just espouses every night.

She was saying, hey, you know, this is white people, and these two people were MAGA white people.

Ruth was not a MAGA white person.

I mean, how much more evidence you need that he hated Trump?

That he had a Harris Trump sticker that he had given to

19 different occasions.

He'd given money to the Democratic side, that he talked openly about killing people.

He thought that Iran might think about killing Trump.

How could you even say something like that that was just crazy?

Yeah.

She doesn't know.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about Israel and the Ukraine.

There's very interesting things going on in Israel, or at least in Lebanon, right next to it.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Victor Davis Hansen show.

So, Victor, the Israel,

wow, the most bizarre thing: a bunch of pager explosions and then walkie-talkies blowing up, I think, today, that have killed a lot of people in addition to injuring thousands.

So, they had pagers and walkie-talkies that had

somehow built into them an explosive element that could be set off by somebody obviously not near them.

And so, and obviously, I think clearly people think

it was somehow designed by Israel.

It's amazing that.

Apparently they hijacked a shipment

from a

Taiwanese company that were making the pagers.

There's so much

lethal irony involved in this story because they were sure that given the recent successful hits on their kingpins in the Hezbollah, Iranian Hamas movement, the whole terrorist network, especially Hezbollah, was not going to use I think Nasrallah said, don't use cell phones, use pagers.

Apparently the Israelis were one thought ahead of them.

They knew that if they attacked these people, they would stop using,

to the same degree, cellphones and go to pagers.

And they had interrupted, reports said today, a shipment that was either routed through Europe or the subsidiary of the Chinese company actually assembled the parts in a European factory.

But they got in there and maybe 4,000 of these things, they put an explosive ingredient near the batteries so that when they had this message that was programmed in all of them all at the same time

that started the batteries to overheat, that served as an igniter and blew these things up.

And there was even a time delay where you would see the thing wouldn't work.

And so the person had an error message, you know, and look at it and get it close.

And if you think about it,

AOC really inadvertently said a very profound thing.

She said this was terrorism because you hit these people.

But that's the point.

This is more selective than you could have with a precision-guided missile based on intelligence.

Who would have

what I'm getting at is, who would have in their possession and use a Hezbollah pager unless they were a terrorist?

So think about it.

It was a weird way of identifying all of the active Hezbollah terrorist

personnel in Lebanon, in Syria.

They blew up with Syria.

And in Iran, they killed.

the ambassador from Iran to Lebanon.

Why was he doing the Hezbollah

terrorist pager?

It's prima facie

an indictment that he's a terrorist, is what I'm saying.

So then the UN said today they were going to investigate because this was terrorism.

But if you think that the UN on the past said that every country has a right to reply to terrorism as long as there's not collateral damage, could you imagine a methodology that has less,

fewer

collateral damages?

Because basically, by the definition of the pager

explosive, it only would explode if a known terrorist had access to a terrorist-approved.

I know you can say there are gradations.

Well, maybe one of them was just a foot soldier and one was.

It doesn't matter.

They were all in the terrorists.

So it was a way of taking out, what, injuring 2,500 plus

and killing, I don't know how many, 12, is it 12 or more than that?

They don't really know that there's figures going on.

You know, they said there there were 4,000, but the point I'm making is it was a selective mechanism of identifying and killing terrorists.

And what was even weirder was

if you wanted to identify everybody in the Middle East who's actively working for Hezbollah, it would be very difficult to do, even for Mossad.

But all you're going to have to do is read the funeral notices, right?

And you don't know who had these terrorists.

And now everybody knows.

So you say, oh, that guy just blew up.

I didn't know he was a Hezbollah activist in my apartment building.

Oh, that guy just blew up.

I didn't know he was working for Hezbollah.

It was an immediate identification system.

And now they know every single family member or everybody who was working for Hezbollah just by reading the funeral announcements.

And that was, that was, and then the next day they repeated it with the walkie-talkies.

Same thing.

They were able to intercept the shipment of walking talkies.

They apparently knew that when they did the hits and people would logically veer away from their cell phones, they had two alternatives, Pagers and Walkie-Talkies, and they planted explosives in both.

And they apparently knew the brand that they would buy, and I don't know how they got in there, but they did it.

Which begs the question,

if you were a Hezbollah terrorist right now,

And you knew that cell phones were being intercepted because people that shouldn't have been killed were easily killed because of information transmitted over the telephone.

And you had over 2,000 people, 2,500 people blow up, not all lethally, and the majority not lethally, but severely wounded and thus identifying themselves as terrorists.

And then you knew they were doing walkie-talkies.

How would you communicate?

What could you use?

Any electronic device you would have to assume was either going to blow you up at some future moment or or was going to identify you or both as a terrorist.

So it really has paralyzed their command and control, which begs the next ironic, why do they do it now?

Why wouldn't you wait?

Because Netanyahu gave a mysterious 10-minute video.

Did you see that today?

No, what was it?

It basically said, I want to warn you that we're going to go in there.

You're not going to let nearly 100,000 Jews be permanently exiled from their border area homes.

So beware.

Well, ideally, you would then time your bombing campaign or assault across the border with this.

Because if you think of a classic destruction of command and control, you couldn't think of anything better.

I think every intelligence agency in the world is now saying, wow, this would be a great thing to do.

on the eve of an invasion.

But I guess they must have known through intelligence that somebody was tipped off or they were going to start examining these and they wanted to use it or lose it, I guess.

Yeah.

But then today, the head of the IDF said, we're not, and they've never claimed official credit for it.

The United States kind of ratted them out, although they were wise not to tell the Biden-Harris administration in advance because they would have leaked it.

But it was very funny.

They said, this does not exhaust this type of strategy.

We have other things in store for you.

Maybe that's just empty rhetoric.

AOC, of course, said it was terrorism and was shocked and wants an investigation to make sure U.S.

funds were not involved.

Which begs the question: when you send 7,500 rockets and they're deliberately sent into civilian areas in the most part, and that is an act of terrorism, and she didn't say a word, then there has to be an explanation.

And the explanation is in the world of AOC and Mashida Tlaib, if you kill Jews, it's fine.

If you go after and retaliate against the people who are trying to kill Jews, that's a crime.

Yeah.

And just there it is.

Yeah.

Well, anybody as you've just described it would understand that this is

probably the beginning of a campaign and they're trying to break up the communication structure inside of Hezbollah.

And so it's part of an act of war rather than terrorism.

It's either an act of war or it's sending a message.

We did this to you.

What are you going to do about it?

And do you really want to fight us?

Because we have more in store.

We can do things that you will not believe.

We can paralyze your communications.

We can take out your command and control on the eve of battle.

Do you really want to do this?

Because we will do this.

If we did it during a calm, what do you think we'll do in war?

We will turn Beirut, Shia Beirut, back to 2006 and let you work on it for another 20 years to rebuild it.

So I think

the ball is in the Hezbollah court.

They have to reply.

I'm sure that what Harris and Biden are doing is sort of the Iranian reaction in

repeat.

Again, it reduces sort of like,

okay,

they took out your kingpin on your soil

so you can reply, but we only want 320 projectiles sent into Israel, and we will guarantee that we'll limit the reply of Israel to three.

So they're probably saying to Hezbollah, well, we know you have to reply,

but this is the exact number that you can send back.

Like that old Star Trek, the original Star Trek where they had a war and that each side was using computers to bomb the person.

There was no actual damage, but a person person had to go report and do a destruction mission.

Oh, yes, yes, I remember that one.

That's what America envisions war as.

Yes, but that's absolutely insane as our leadership is right now.

So no surprise.

So one more question, and this is about the Ukraine.

And the news this week is that NATO countries are going to give to Ukraine missiles that can reach all the way far into Russian territory.

And I was wondering if you believe that's smart or not.

So we have high-Mars accurate missiles.

We have F-15s that will be equipped with

plane-to-surface missiles.

We know that their sophisticated avionics and electronics can get through Russian defenses and fly missions.

We know that the

guided missiles, even the artillery right on the border, they have the mechanisms to do that.

They're already inside Russian territory.

And Vladimir Putin, now for over two years,

from February 24th of 2022 to now September 18th,

has said he was going to use tactical nuclear war.

And everybody said, ah, he's bluffing.

But you start hitting Mother Russia and you get a whole element of the Russian population who is indifferent to the war or opposed.

It's kind of a total war, you know what I mean?

And it'll be like the German people in the last year.

They had no choice.

And so I don't think it's a wise idea.

And it's occurring at a time when the Europeans themselves, if you look at the relative contributions in terms of actual munitions and money,

They had, at the very beginning, we were overwhelmingly the largest donor, but they were really pulling their weight.

They're They're not now.

It's about 75% America.

And I really don't think it's a wise idea myself.

And there was an the New York Times confirmed, this is official figures that are probably underestimated by both sides, that there's a million dead, wounded, and missing, one million people.

And everybody should to take a deep breath and ask themselves one central question.

Do you really believe that Ukraine has the ability to eject, as stated as their war aim, every Russian, not just from the aggressive

stance in February 24th of 2022, but

according to their war aims, they want to push the Russians out of the Donbass and out of the Crimea to their pre-2014 borders?

And alternatively, do you really believe the Russians Russians have the ability after what you saw in the Kiev fiasco to absorb large swaths of Ukraine?

I don't.

So we all know what's happening.

Maybe it's going to take another million dead, wounded, and missing, or two million, but eventually someone's going to say this is insane.

And Putin, you go back to where you were before February 24th of 2022, and you go tell the Russian people that Ukraine's not going to be in NATO, and that's why you invaded.

If that's what it takes, you go ahead and lie.

And then you can go lie and say you've institutionalized, the war was fought to institutionalize the reality on the ground, which was going to be tenuous and fluid unless it was now institutionalized.

And they have agreed that you have Donbass and Crimea.

And then Ukraine can say, we ejected this huge bully and beat him and forced him back where he was on the staff.

And by the way, that's what Zelensky and the Russians have been haggling over since 2014.

They were even talking about having some kind of settlement along those lines.

What I just said will get you ostracized,

demonized by the neoconservative, and let's fight the war to the last Ukrainian-American bloc.

But that's what we were looking at.

It reminds me, I wrote an article about the 1939 and 19 to 9, November 39 to May 1940 winter war, the Finland War.

And Mannerheim and the Finns fought brilliantly, just like the

Ukrainians.

And they tried to push, and when they were all said and done,

they achieved a very strategic victory.

They said that Stalin would not take over their country,

but they were going to grant him the original agenda, the 10% of Finland that he took.

And that's where it ended up.

But it was 500,000 Russian dead and wounded, and about 100,000 Finns.

And that's what we're doing.

But nobody wants to, if you say that, I gave a lecture today, and there's a person who really didn't want to hear that, ask a question after this talk.

And I have so many colleagues who really are sincerely committed to the idea that the United States is going to give another $300 billion,

$400 billion, maybe a trillion.

We're $36 trillion in debt.

Why not?

And then we're going to

Moscow?

Do they ever say to themselves in their planning sessions in the West Wing, do they they say,

what

level of damage

can we inflict on Russian troops and on Putin's reputation inside Mother Russia that will win the war and Putin will quit

versus that will so inflame the Russian people that we'll have an existential exchange of nuclear weapons?

I don't think they talk about that.

But there is a point.

There is a point.

When somebody has 6,500 deliverable nuclear weapons, tactical and strategic, and the Ukrainians have nothing other than the word of the British, the French, and the United States to support them, but they're not a NATO member.

And in the calculus of Cold War realpolitik,

do you really believe that,

I don't know, the British government's going to give up London to protect the Ukrainian border in a nuclear exchange, or we're going to give up New York or Washington just to protect the border integrity?

No.

No.

Of course.

Putin knows that, huh?

Yeah.

Here's one of your readers on this subject.

He says, if Ukraine fires missiles deep into Russia, then Poland, Hungary, and West Europe can expect a similar response.

There's World War III.

Then there's the nuclear factor.

As Trump had a previous and, from all accounts, good relationship with both parties as a private citizen, citizen, he ought to make some overtures before it gets to that intractable stage because it's quite apparent that Biden et al.

want to ratchet things up.

That was an interesting thing.

That was from Irese Rock at applepodcast.com.

We don't talk about that, but that's something that we should consider, isn't it?

Because that's how these wars start.

The unthink, I just wrote a book on it, and the epilogue has all these hot spots in the modern world.

It could end up like a Carthage or a Constantinople.

And these people don't...

Do you really believe that Joe Biden

is in control of his cognitive facilities and thinks this out?

Or that do you have confidence in Anthony Blinken, the architect, basically with Mike Morrell of the 51 intelligence sources?

that proved the laptop supposedly was Russian disinformation?

Or do you really have confidence in Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor, who was really the one who,

what, deluded the country about the alpha ping caper from Trump Tower in 2016?

I have zero confidence in all three of them.

And yet

we just naively go along, and it's kind of a litmistash.

You either for unquestioned 100% or you're a isolationist idiot.

And then there's all this,

I'm not an isolationist by any means, but there's this weird disconnect where Kamala Harris just said that,

she said in that interview, well,

they said, what are you going to do to pressure, she really went after Israel.

She said,

we've suspended

2,000-pound bombs and put a pause on them until we get a ceasefire and negotiate settlement.

I'm thinking,

That was congressionally approved.

That's what they impeached Donald Trump did.

That is suspending congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine out of a political calculus to help him win an election, i.e., he wanted to go out for the Biden family, supposedly.

She's only saying that in reaction to the Michigan Arab-American vote.

So she's basically saying that I'm so worried about that vote and the Palestinian cause, I'm willing to suspend congressionally approved military aid to Israel.

Why doesn't she ever say to Ukraine and Russia, let's have a ceasefire,

there haven't been a million casualties in Gaza.

Why doesn't she say

to Israel,

hey,

there's no worry about a nuclear war.

Don't worry about it.

We want you to use these weapons and just go hit the Iranian homeland, just like Ukraine's going to do with Russia.

That's what we want.

Why doesn't she say to Netanyahu,

we've given him him $300 billion of munitions, and there's a lot of civilians in the Donbass and Crimea,

on bridges and buildings, and we don't really care about collateral.

We've never said one thing about collateral damage.

So you too, we don't care about collateral.

What don't they say to Ukraine?

We're going to force you to have a ceased fire.

Instead of onto Moscow victory, there's so many disconnects between our stance with Zelensky and Netanyahu.

I don't know what the difference is.

I have my feelings, suspicions.

And then

against all that, then the isolationist right has one good point.

This started out, it's more than a border war, but it was a territorial dispute over borders.

We have no border with Mexico.

It's disappeared.

So we have all these people who

saying that this is a critical national security interest of the United States, that Russia stays in its border, although they didn't say that that in 2014.

They never said that to Obama.

Are you willing to go to war over this Iraq?

Supply the Ukrainians as a proxy?

But they don't seem to be bothered at all that we have no border.

They don't seem to care about all these communities that are impacted and all these people being killed and what to do with 10, 15 million people over the next 30 years.

Who's going to house them?

Who's going to give them,

I don't know, 2 million housing units?

Who's going to train another 5,000 doctors to treat them?

It's this typical left-wing, oh, I'm morally superior and the border should be open so the poor and the indigenous and the unwashed masses can come.

And you know what?

Let all those right-wing nuts worry about health care and schools and all of that stuff.

We'll just write a check.

Not in my name.

How dare you talk about that?

You're a racist.

That's what's going to happen.

You've got 10 San Francisco's now you have to, or maybe 15, that you're going to need housing and education and criminal justice and more police, more doctors, more health plans.

And we're,

the only thing that's bothering me a little bit about Trump,

he says all these great things.

He's going to not tax tips, not tax Social Security on...

elderly people

and he's going to get rid of the restrictions on the salt, you know, the state and local taxes that was,

his Congress in 2017 said that you could no longer take that deduction.

You add all of that up.

It's about $2 trillion.

And when you talk, and then you have Harris saying, I'm going to give everybody $25,000 for a house, small businesses, you can't make it on $5,000.

Why not give $50,000?

And then she's going to cancel a trillion dollar more and

a trillion dollars more in student loan debt.

And so where do they all get the money?

Where does it come from?

Trump says it comes from oil sales, but if you go up by 5 million barrels at the current price of about $80,

you don't get it over $10.

You don't get it.

You do not get the trillions you need.

She says you're going to tax by raising capital gains, a wealth tax, a tax on unrealized income.

higher inheritance taxes.

It's still not going to get enough.

And it's just going to wreck the economy.

So I wish everybody would say

we're broke.

We're like fourth century, fifth century Rome.

And we have to have a strong military, and we're going to go back and get old Al Simpson and Erskine Bowles and dust off their plan and stick to it.

Three simple tax brackets, we'll get a balanced budget in about six or seven years.

If we had done that under Obama in 2009, who authorized the Commission, we would be at now, we would be just about about debt-free.

And we'd be a hell of a lot better than we are now.

Not just on the debt, on other things.

Because we wouldn't have had the money to pay for transgendered surgeries for illegal aliens.

Yeah, I think I and also your listeners wish they would talk more about how they're going to pay for the things that they want to do.

But as you say, that's not part of the campaign plan.

You know, that's one thing about Ike, you know,

when he took over the Korean War in January of 1953,

they had an excise tax.

And he didn't believe in going back to the World War II model of 130% GDP borrowing again.

They were trying to pay that debt down.

So everything that they needed to win the war in Korea, they made people cough up.

Final thing is

I've talked about these October surprises.

So you remember before the 2022 midterms, they drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and they leaked the Dobbs decision illegally from the Supreme Court and they drained a third of the petroleum reserve.

So now we're nearing October.

And lo and behold, the Fed just today

cut interest rates not by a quarter, but by half a percent and said there may be more to come.

Why do it right now?

Why not just wait till after November?

Just like the DOJ is not supposed to prosecute a leading candidate 90 days.

Can't we have a rule that says the Fed will not tamper with interest rates 90 days before an election?

And by the way, that's the first of the October surprises.

These people will do anything to defeat Donald Trump, who they think is their existential satanic enemy.

We're going to see a lot worse than that in the next 40 days.

A lot worse.

Well, with that, Victor, we are at the end of our show.

Thank you so much.

I want to end on an upbeat.

You don't want to end on that.

Yes, I have starting

Friday

of this week, we'll have the first installment of a nine-part

condensed reply to Darrell Cooper's take on World War II.

And

it's not personal.

It's not making fun of him.

I'm not saying this or that about him.

I'm just taking his quote and trying to analyze it whether there's data to support it.

And I go through each argument

and it'll be running over on the ultra web victorhanson.com for the next three weeks.

Oh, nice.

And they're each about 800 words.

So it took me a long time.

I think I did 10,000 words.

Wow.

And it just tries to, I don't try to be esoteric and bring in weird things of the public.

Just logical arguments and generally held and commonly known knowledge.

And I have a little footnote about Tucker, Tucker, too.

I've had a lot of people write me about that, just in closing, both from the left, how dare you criticize Darrell Cooper without

damning Tucker.

And on the other, why in an election year would you try to refute somebody that hurts the Republican cause?

Why are we talking about World War II when Trump is in an existential fight with Harris?

And there's easy answers to both of those questions.

As I said, Tucker Carlson believes in an open, free platform.

I think

he's a personal friend of mine, so I have to be honest,

I think

he bent over backwards on having an academic go on his show for five years on a Tuesday night each week after his monologue and letting me speak for three or four minutes uninterrupted.

I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude.

And I admire admire what he's doing with this free,

but I think what's happening is

that

people are coming out of the woodwork

with

kind of ideas that support his mega

agenda.

And he's not

because he's so paranoid about censoring anybody and let the arena of ideas work.

And so I think Tucker would probably say, well, I put the guy on and

like you and Andrew Roberts and Neil Ferguson refuted him.

He got his say, you got his say, and we'll let the people decide.

But the problem is that 70 people heard something that was factually and deliberately, I think, wrong.

It was a deliberate effort to

advance an argument which

the author knew could not be supported.

So you've kind of empowered that.

And I don't think he meant to.

I know a lot of people tell me that he did,

but I think what happens is that now that he is the

largest,

what's the word?

He's got more power than almost anybody in the conservative movement as far as reaching people.

He's up there with Joe Rogan and Ben Shapiro's apparatus, and he's very successful, and he's going to bring out more and more people who say, you know what, Tucker, I admire you.

They've censored me.

They've kicked me off X.

They have some weird views maybe on, well, let me get on there.

And I think he's going to have to get a team of two or three people to make a line where he said, this is eccentric, but is

tolerable in the sense you can make an argument, even though it's a minority and non-persuasive argument, but it's not based on fallacy, versus this, there's no evidence for this.

Come on.

There's no evidence that two million people were killed, Russian prisoners, and then later on probably a million Jews in Ukraine because of chaos of the war.

This was deliberate.

There are fewer directives.

There is

General Halder's diary where he says this is...

There's Goering himself that said this was planned.

And so this is completely, factually, and deliberately incorrect.

And you could distinguish that.

We do it on our program, and we have people come on all the time.

We have people who call and they want to come on and they say, I have this theory, I'd like to come on the, and we don't do very many podcasts, but when we do things like Stephen Quay

or

we had

H.R.

McMaster.

H.R.

McMaster was very controversial, but we have them on because

they are demonstrably credible and they use evidence and the people who are listening can disagree, but they can't say he lied or he made up something.

They can't.

They can say he interpreted known evidence that we all commonly agree on.

And so there's a difference.

And I think Tucker will evolve.

I think he won't do that again.

We'll see.

We'll see.

Well, thanks to our audience.

And thank you, Victor.

Thank you for having me, Sammy.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.